04/12/2002
A 10-year-old girl drowned in Surry County, Va., while playing in a sand and gravel pit near her home. The girl lived about a half mile from the pit, a surface mine containing pools of water 30 feet wide and up to about a dozen feet deep. She had been playing at the site with her brother and a female friend when the two girls decided to go swimming, the sheriff said. Authorities did not locate her body until the next morning.

The girl's mother had taken both her children to the sand pit the night before the drowning and told the children it was dangerous to go there.